Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

At the upcoming BizTalk User Group (BTUG) meeting in Almere on June, 29th I will do a talk on integration between SalesForce and BizTalk. In past I have been involved in an integration project with SalesForce using BizTalk 2009 and have blogged about it: BizTalk, SalesForce and MSMQ – Part I BizTalk, SalesForce and MSMQ – Part II Also recently in Dutch .NET magazine an article has been published called “Force.com werkt met BizTalk Server 2010”. Besides this talk Saravana Kumar will talk about and demo BizTalk 360 . Jeroen Boiten will kick off with a presentation on integration project at GasUnie. You will have a chance to hear and meet (Dutch, UK) BizTalk community members and can register here . Technorati: biztalk server 2010

In this post I would like to continue, where I left of in Part I where a did a run down in setting up an account at SalesForce, building a service and how to consume its WSDL. Also explained some security details necessary for communication with your SalesForce service. In an orchestration you can consume a web service build in SalesForce, through running BizTalk WCF Service Consuming Wizard. If you run the wizard and pick WDSL generated for your service BizTalk will generate schema and binding file for you. Schema en binding file shown below. Binding file will be helpful in creating WCF-Custom send port. I have built an orchestration that consumes my created SalesForce web service. The orchestration is initiated (activated) by picking up a file form a folder location. Xml file contains account name I want to retrieve details from SalesForce. Information in the file will be used to call the service and response message is sent to MSMQ. In MessageAssign shape code from ForceToken is ...

In this and following blogposts I would like to share my experience with integrating SalesForce with a fictive system via MSMQ (fictive system could be ERP, package application, service, ect). Integration is facilitated by BizTalk Server 2009 running on one of my VM machines (hosted by Hyper-V, see BizTalk Virtual Machines with Windows 2008 R2 Hyper V ). SalesForce is a leading CRM software solution that runs in the cloud and can be viewed as software as a service (SaaS). SalesForce itself states it is a leader in CRM (true if you consider their offering as off-premise software) and platform as a service. Latter sounds optimistic as there are some similarities with Microsoft Azure, which is also viewed as platform as a service with richer set of capabilities and a lot more flexibility. SalesForce is more targeted on CRM and you can build applications around it that can be hosted in the cloud or develop services, which I did and I am not the only one. I was inspired by Richard Seroter’s...